history – Much That Is Fair

Mother of Cities

There are pluses and minuses to using a conference as an excuse to travel. In general, I find the pluses outweigh the minuses in the long run: sometimes you can get a grant to help cover the experience, you have a built-in reason for being somewhere and are often among people who are eager to make friends or at least grab coffee, you get to see places that the regular tourists might not go, and so on. The minus, however, is a big one: you are not going to see very much of the city beyond the conference venues unless you leave the conference. Case in point: for the first three days I was in Prague, I walked by the opera house where Don Giovanni premiered and the city’s famous astrological clock without even registering them, because I was running late. Whoops.

Poor Old Erin’s Isle

As a child, I first encountered Ireland through its music. One of my favorite songs on my mother’s Kingston Trio CD was “Roddy McCorley,” the song about the 1798 revolutionary who was hanged on the bridge of Toome. This meant that practically the first thing I ever learned about Ireland, ahead of the shamrocks and the leprechauns and the Guinness, was that they were an unrestful country: “In Ireland,” the recording begins, “in all of their many revolutions, they always found someone to use as a hero.” It would be many years before I learned what exactly they were revolting about, but those two early associations would remain: music and an unquiet existence.

What to an American is the Fourth of July?

On July 9, 1776, five days after its publication and shortly after the Declaration of Independence was read aloud to the people of New York City, New Yorkers tore down the statue of King George that had stood in Bowling Green since 1770 in a fierce demonstration of their new independence. The statue had a tangled history in the years that followed: much of it was melted down to serve as bullets in the Revolutionary War, while Loyalists in Connecticut smuggled a few pieces away to save: centuries later. One of George’s amputated arms was unearthed in 1991 and went up for auction in 2019. George’s horse’s tail went on display at the New York Historical in 2022 as part of an exhibit on the history of America’s difficult relationship with monuments. No one is quite sure what became of the monarch’s head.

A Cup of Kindness Yet

I spent my last weekend in the UK in London with a friend who had flown over from the States, mostly so that she could see the revival of Guys & Dolls playing on the West End before it closes next month. Upon meeting Kings Cross Station, she remarked to me that she always forgets until she arrives in the UK how different its culture is from America’s, a culture shock epitomized this time by a broken-down escalator on the Elizabeth Line. An attendant had been standing by it, explaining that it was broken, apologizing for the inconvenience, and directing passengers to the working escalator. My friend lives in New York City, where the very idea of doing this would probably get you laughed out onto the street. “There was even still a working escalator next to him,” she said, in tones of wonderment.

“A Most Noble Ruin”

After the 2016 election, exhausted from campaign work and horrified by the turn my country had taken, I took a week off before the next political races began to visit an old friend in France. Their family had moved to a town near the Swiss border some years before, and I had hoped to visit for quite some time. I had only once before been to Europe. We saw a whole range of things on a family road trip to visit some of their expat friends who lived on the other side of the country, but what I remembered most were the castles, and how France seemed to have more of them than they now knew what to do with. We saw castles that were overrun with commercialism, full of fake armour and jousting flags, and ones that were open and empty and that you could walk through entirely unsupervised. These ruins had been living spaces once, full of their own histories and purposes. Taken together in the twenty-first century, they posed a difficult question about the physical remnants of history. How do we decide what we do with what the past has left behind?

City of Literature

Perhaps not unlike many children my age, I first came to know Edinburgh through Harry Potter: the legendary place where J.K. Rowling had first dreamed up the boy wizard. Once, a visit to The Elephant House, where the story’s first chapters were written, would have been one of the highest pilgrimages I could make in the United Kingdom. And rightfully so, I think. I owe a great deal to Rowling. Her stories taught me, as they did many in my generation, about the power of our choices, even when our actions seem to have little effect on the wider picture. They offered me role models, particularly in the form of a bookish girl who could get along just fine with her classmates without sacrificing her grades. And it was thanks to Rowling, more so than anyone except perhaps my third-grade teacher, that I learned how to write. She told her readers that if they wanted to learn to write, they had to read: to read everything that came in front of them, from the nutrition facts on the cereal box to any book that passed into their hands.

On (Anti) Heroes & Heroines

By far the most exciting thing I did in London this week, over and including seeing a very old friend for dinner, doing the actual research that will hopefully shore up my future career as a scholar, and visiting a number of excellent bookstores (recs below), was seeing David Tennant on the West End, where he is currently starring as Macbeth.

I have a perverse love for Macbeth. Probably it should not surprise anyone at this point that I prefer Shakespeare’s tragedies over the comedies (and the histories that end in tragedy, like Richard III, over the nominally happy ones, like Henry V). Maybe it’s the pessimist in me, which likes the reassurance on stage that in fact, sometimes things don’t work out. More likely, I think I’m drawn to the pronouncements on human nature and mortal life that Shakespeare’s tragedies produce, and the gift he had for making you pity even the most awful of people (Richard III is a good example) in the hands of the right actor. I like to think that this puts me in a long line of amateur Shakespeare fans, those of us too poorly-read to know any better but fond of Shakespeare all the same. The most famous of these (of course) is Abraham Lincoln, who once declared in a letter to a Shakespearean actor, “I think nothing equals Macbeth—It is wonderful.” Lincoln was famously obsessed with the idea of ambition, being himself an extraordinarily ambitious man, and he was drawn to Macbeth’s story as a kind of cautionary tale. But when his letter about his own ideas of Shakespeare went public, he was broadly ridiculed in the press. Amateurs are amateurs, even if they are the President.

Lest We Forget

This September, on a flight from Seattle to Chicago, I met a man who lived in Michigan and was flying home to surprise his wife. Flights into O’Hare, for anyone who has not had the unique misery of heading there themselves, often land early and then sit stranded out on the runway for half an hour. This one took a full hour, and he grew increasingly worried that he wouldn’t make his connecting flight to get home in time. I asked what he would do. “I’ll just rent a car and drive,” he told me. If he did that, he would still get there by the time she woke up.

I could make a statistical guess based on various demographic details about how he voted last Tuesday. I could probably make similar guesses about other strangers I have met in my endless trips around the country: about a retired Army colonel who lives in North Carolina and paid for me to go on a historical tour because he heard I was a student; about the man who stopped my father and me when we were out canvassing in Wisconsin a week ago to warn us that without a flashlight on, we risked getting hit by a car; about a group of women who took me out to lunch in rural Wyoming just because I had driven up to visit their town. I could, but I won’t, because I remember them as decent people, and because we must see our fellow Americans as human beings first, whatever they are to us second.

In Search of a Usable Past

I have never bothered to conduct a survey, but I suspect that if you did, less than ten percent of the American population could reliably distinguish between the origins of Memorial Day and Veterans Day, rolled as they have been into one commemorative space. This is not your average American’s fault, really: maybe Memorial Day is a little more exciting, with the guaranteed three-day weekend and day off, but we have not marked them as distinct in any meaningful way for a long time now.

They are, however, quite distinct. Memorial Day is the older of the two, although it was once celebrated primarily on May 30, moving through the week like Veterans Day does. It was also reliably celebrated in only half the country until, at the very least, World War I, and in some places not until the 1990s. When it was known as Decoration Day, Memorial Day was a holiday to honor Union soldiers; states of the former Confederacy, in a rarely successful display of their commitment to states’ rights, selected different dates by state for Confederate Memorial Day. The death of Stonewall Jackson, May 10, was popular; so was the date of the Confederate surrender to William Tecumseh Sherman (April 26). Strangely, given their consummate fixation on defeat, no one selected April 9: the date of the surrender at Appomattox.

Je Me Souviens

One of the curses of being a graduate student is that you are completely unbound from the normal tethers that anchor people to reality, like working hours and HR offices and regular, reliable wages. It is a challenge that has both professional and personal ramifications – is well documented, these days, the kinds of abuses that graduate students are vulnerable in the academy, but it is quite possible to drive yourself mad in a world without deadlines, job prospects, or any clear sense of what you’re doing most of the time. To finish in one piece, you must find your own way of handling the constant uncertainty.

I have coped with this pressure, for better or worse, by leaning into it, which gives me the (mostly false) illusion that I have some control over what I’m doing and what will happen to me when I graduate. Most recently, this led me north, all the way to our Canadian neighbors, where I spent a brief period this winter visiting Quebec City and their Winter Carnaval while working on writing a dissertation chapter.